7 ways of looking at white-winged doves

I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes
–Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

1.

Each time you put your blue and white striped towel on the chair by the pool and enter the water for the laps you love to swim, the white-winged dove you have called Carmen (for its sultry vibrato) comes to perch on the pine pole nearby. Sing, Carmen, sing your aria, while a swimmer windmills and turns.

Love is a rebellious bird
That none can tame,
And it is quite in vain that one calls it,
If it suits it to refuse.

2.

What were they saying? Morning, morning, morning. Wake up! Today is the day you will drive out to Teotitlán del Valle to watch the weaver card fleece, spin it to yarn, dye it with indigo, calendula, cochineal, pomegranate, pecan shell, rock lichen, mint. We have been on this land for 5 generations, he tells you, and you buy a carpet rich with lightning, rain, corn, the geometric spiral of life. Coming back that evening, a storm comes in over the mountains. You almost see lightning, the carpet rolled tight in its carrier bag.

3.

They begin at 5:30, calling, calling. The trees in the courtyard tremble with the sound. The tulip trees in the courtyard tremble with goldfinches. By the time you sit at the little table with espresso from the cafe on the street, the sun is hot.

4.

What kind of hummingbirds alight on the columns of Pachycereus cactus along the edge of the pool, alight, pushing their long beaks into the green flesh? Were they the Berylline, the Beautiful, the Blue-Throated, the Bumblebee? They paused so briefly that you couldn’t really tell.

5.

You are blue and silver throated yourself when you wrap the beautiful shawl the weaver made around your shoulders for a night out at the red restaurant where you celebrate 46 years of knowing the man you married.

6.

On the last morning, you were awake before the doves, awake in the shuttered room, hearing only a car or two on the C. Porfirio Díaz, your suitcase packed, the length of fabric you bought to make a cushion tucked into the very back compartment. It remembers rain, the cycle of life, a few bars of lightning on the road from Hierve el Agua to Oaxaca. You had hoped to find an acorn from the holm oaks growing near the mineral pool but no, no, though a black vulture soared over the valley and something, not a dove, sang in the guaje on the long trail back.

7.

Removed from its carrier bag, unrolled on the pine trunk where you store your sweaters, the carpet waits now for a place of its own. Already you miss Carmen on the post by the pool.

Note: the carpet and shawl were created in the Zapotec Spirit studio of Oscar Perez in Teotitlán del Valle.